Ralph Steadman reminisces about Hunter S. Thompson on the reissue of 'The Curse of Lono'

"Most of it actually really did happen, although a lot of it I didn't actually see," Ralph Steadman says from his home in southeast England.

This could act as a pretty good epigraph for most of the canon of work for which the celebrated British cartoonist and caricaturist is best known: his long-term collaboration with the late American journalistic pioneer, prose stylist par excellence, and general bringer of madness and mayhem Hunter S. Thompson.

However, the specific work Steadman is referring to is The Curse of Lono, the duo's great semi-lost book detailing a trip to Hawaii to cover the Honolulu marathon as a journalist, followed by a stay on the Big Island during which the late Thompson, in characteristically intense, white-knuckle style, becomes increasingly obsessed with the legend of the Hawaiian deity Lono, making numerous enemies in the process.

Not a whole lot actually happens in the book: the author mostly fails to cover the marathon, stays in a house by the sea in bad weather, goes fishing a couple of times, and that's it. But Thompson, as ever, like a 20th-century Laurence Sterne, manages to spin this meagre material into a hilarious grand farce filled with rich descriptions and unlikely digressions, fraught with peril and involving a cast of dangerous oddballs with whom he has deeply strange and funny conversations. Throughout, the usual Thompson chaos of alcohol and drugs, casual violence and massive overspending on other people's tabs prevails.

Originally published in 1983, the book was withdrawn from sale soon afterwards, then re-released in 2005 by boutique publisher Taschen in a limited-edition of 1,000 predictably lavish (for which read: expensive) hardback monsters, each of them signed by both author and artist; Thompson took his own life just a month after it was published.

It has now been reissued by Taschen in a smaller, more affordable but still handsomely produced hardback version. "I prefer it to the bigger one, which looks like a comic book," says Steadman. "Now it looks serious again. I can't believe it when I look at the pieces in there and see '81 on them. It feels like someone's stolen about 25 years of my life."